Mobileye to Buy Shashua’s Robotics Startup Mentee for $900 Million: Deal approved by Intel

Mobileye, the autonomous driving company controlled by Intel, has agreed to acquire Mentee Robotics, a robotics startup founded by Mobileye co-founder Amnon Shashua, in a deal valued at $900 million, the companies said.

Mobileye will pay $612 million in cash and the remainder in 26.2 million shares for Mentee, a non-revenue company founded in 2022. Intel, which owns about 85% of Mobileye, approved the transaction. Shashua, who serves as Mentee’s chairman and chief executive and sits on Mobileye’s board, recused himself from the vote.

Major Exit for a Young Startup

The acquisition represents a significant exit for Mentee’s shareholders. To date, the company has raised a single $40 million funding round led by Ahren Innovation Capital, with participation from Cisco and Israeli fund 10D.

Other shareholders include Mentee’s founders, Prof. Lior Wolf, who serves as chief executive, and Prof. Shalu-Schwartz (also known as Shashua’s longtime research partner), who is Mobileye’s chief technology officer. Shashua owns roughly 1% of Mobileye, which is currently valued at about $10 billion on Wall Street.

Mobileye said it had evaluated several potential robotics acquisitions and selected Mentee due to what it described as the startup’s superior technology.

Strategic Shift Toward “Physical AI”

The deal is expected to reshape Mobileye’s long-term strategy, expanding its focus beyond autonomous vehicles into what the industry increasingly calls “physical AI” — artificial intelligence embodied in physical systems such as humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles and industrial robots.

The term has gained prominence following its use by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Ironically, Mentee currently uses Nvidia chips, even as Nvidia has identified robotics as a key future growth area.

Mobileye said it expects to begin selling humanoid robots as early as 2028, initially targeting industrial applications such as logistics centers and assembly lines rather than household tasks.

Technology and Customer Synergies

Mobileye plans to integrate its chips and software with Mentee’s robotics platforms, while also leveraging overlapping customer bases. Automakers that already purchase Mobileye’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), for example, could also become customers for robots deployed in vehicle manufacturing plants.

In 2024, after operating largely in stealth mode, Mentee unveiled “Menteebot,” a humanoid robot designed to carry out complex tasks based on natural-language commands, including navigation, object recognition and manipulation.

From Cars to Robots

While autonomous driving and robotics may appear distinct, industry leaders increasingly see them as closely related. An autonomous vehicle is often described as a “robot on wheels,” sharing core technologies such as perception, motion planning and real-time decision-making.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, has highlighted the use of similar chips and algorithms in Tesla vehicles and the company’s Optimus humanoid robot.

Mobileye’s Broader Context

Shashua is widely regarded as a leading visionary in autonomous driving and machine vision. However, Mobileye’s long-standing ambition to deploy fully autonomous vehicles at scale has yet to be realized, with most of its revenue still coming from ADAS products.

In recent years, Mobileye has faced a slowdown due to excess inventory among customers and has carried out several rounds of layoffs, including a cut of about 200 employees — roughly 4% of its workforce — last month.

Despite these challenges, Mobileye expects its first autonomous taxi services based on its technology to begin operating in the United States this year. Earlier this week, the company announced a major order from a U.S. automaker identified as General Motors for 9 million ADAS chips, following a similar deal with Volkswagen. Mobileye said its current order backlog totals $24 billion.

Mixed Record, New Bets

Beyond Mobileye, Shashua has experienced setbacks in other ventures, including a sharp contraction at Orcam and losses at Israel’s digital bank One Zero. He is also reported to be in advanced talks to sell AI21, another high-profile startup, to Nvidia for an estimated $2–3 billion.

Shashua’s most ambitious current project is AAI, an artificial intelligence startup founded last year that has reportedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation exceeding $1 billion and is operating largely out of the public spotlight.

The Mentee deal now places robotics at the center of Mobileye’s next chapter — and marks one of the most consequential shareholder transactions yet for one of Israel’s most prominent tech entrepreneurs.